The Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD) under Digital India Corporation, Ministry of Electronics and IT, organized a workshop at Maharashtra Mantralaya in collaboration with the state's Language Department to explore multilingual and voice-enabled Artificial Intelligence for strengthening access to digital services in Marathi and other Indian languages. The workshop focused on enabling more inclusive, accessible, and citizen-centric digital governance through language technologies that understand, process, and communicate in everyday languages.
The BHASHINI team conducted live demonstrations of its multilingual AI capabilities including speech recognition, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, translation, and voice-enabled interaction, showing how these technologies can be integrated into public services for more natural citizen-system interactions. A key emphasis was placed on the importance of high-quality language data for developing locally relevant AI systems, with opportunities for language experts, government institutions, academia, and communities to strengthen language datasets through BhashaDaan, BHASHINI's crowdsourcing initiative.
The engagement explored department-specific Language AI incorporating specialized government terminology to improve understanding and processing of government content. Discussions also covered the potential Maharashtra-focused multilingual AI ecosystem concept called MahaBHASHINI, which would support language-inclusive experiences across tourism, transport, and other public-facing services. The workshop served to identify priority use cases and collaboration areas between the Government of Maharashtra and BHASHINI, bringing together government officials, language experts, and stakeholders to exchange ideas on language technology applications.
BHASHINI currently supports 36 Indian text languages, 23 Indian voice languages, and 35 international languages, powers 800+ government websites, has enabled over 9 billion cumulative AI inferences, and processes over 24 million AI inferences daily through the National Hub for Language Technology (NHLT), one of the largest inferencing platforms in the Global South.